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In Ways-Millianism: A Puzzle (Part One), I explained how ways of believing can be employed to respond to Frege Puzzles. In this post, I’ll explain how this strategy gives us a nice tool for our philosopher’s toolkit. However, adding that tool introduces what appears to me to be a serious puzzle. I’ll discuss that puzzle in the next post.

Recalling the Ways Millian Strategy
Recall (C) and (D) from the first post.

(C) Sarah believes that Mark Twain wrote Huck Finn
(D) Sarah believes that Samuel Clemens wrote Huck Finn

Once you’re on board with the Millian strategy of explaining our intuitions that (C) and (D) could differ in truth value by appeal to ways of thinking about one and the same thing under different ways of believing or modes of presentation – you’ve got a nice tool to add to your philosopher’s toolkit. Here are some examples.

Ethical Naturalism
It has been suggested that The Open Question Argument against ethical naturalism is a kind of Frege Puzzle. Your intuitions about the following:

(E) X is good, but is X pleasant?
(F) X is good, but is X good?

We find it intuitive that (E) and (F) are different questions. So, ‘good’ must not mean pleasant. Good-ness must not equal pleasant-ness. Since you could do this for any natural property, good-ness (if it exists) must be a non-natural property.

Enter Ways – Your intutions about (E) and (F) can be explained by appeal to ways. You simply have two different ways of thinking about one and the same thing.

Materialism about the Mind
Here’s a simplistic argument that the mental states are not identical to brain states. Imagine Little Johnny feels hungry. An identity theorist about the mind will hold that the state of being-hungry is identical to some brain state B. Call the state of being-hungry H and the brain state B.

(G) Little Johnny knows about H
(H) Little Johnny does not know about B

So, by Leibniz Law H does not equal B. Problem for the identity theorist.

Enter Ways – Johnny does know about B, he just knows about it using the H-way of thinking about it. He has two ways of thinking about one and the same thing.

Philosophy of Time
I won’t go into the details here, but Ted Sider appeals to the idea that you can think about the same fact under two different propositional guises in Four-Dimensionalism. This is how he responds to the Thank-Goodness-That’s-Over argument against eternalism.

Upgrading the Philosopher’s Toolkit
My main point in this post is that once you’ve adopted the Ways-Millian metaphysics of belief, you can start using it to respond to a bunch of philosophical problems and puzzles. It’s a wonderful little tool to add to your philosopher’s toolkit. There are more examples of this, but these three are good enough now.

But, this leads to a puzzle. Stay tuned…

2 Responses to “Ways-Millianism: A Puzzle (Part Two)”

  1. Suzy Creamcheese

    is (F) supposed to be “X is pleasant, but is X good?”? that’s the only way i can make sense of this.

    also, in response to materialism about the mind, i guess i don’t see the issue here. Just because Johnny doesn’t know about brain-state-B doesn’t mean that a.) it doesn’t exist or b.) it’s not identical to hunger-state-H.

  2. Andrew Cullison

    (F) is supposed to be “X is good, but is X good?” – just like it says.

    This was a rough presentation of the open question argument. The idea is that if ‘good’ and ‘pleasant’ meant the exact same thing, then there should be no difference in meaning between (F) and (E) – but intuitively there is some difference.

    With the materialism about the mind part, the idea is supposed to be that if Johnny knows about X, but doesn’t know about Y, then X cannot be the same thing as Y because something is true about X that is not true about Y.

    One way to formulate the principle would be

    If X = Y, then anything that is true of X is true of Y.

    Since Johnny knows about the mental state, but not the brain state, something is true about the mental state that is not true about the brain state.

    At least, that’s the way the argument is supposed to go.

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